paint your palette blue and grey
by vega-de-la-lyre
Summary: Even the most uncreative soul cannot be exposed to Vincent van Gogh for prolonged periods of time without having something of his genius rub off on them, and Amy is no exception. / Amy/Vincent.


Vincent is leaning against the counter and looking out through the small window over the sink. There is a traffic jam on the street below, a snarl of honking cars, all caused by some tragicomic brawl between a street vendor and a bicyclist Amy had just narrowly avoided coming back from the shop.

She pauses, licks her lips, and speaks.

"Do you miss it?"

It doesn't seem as though he hears her at first but then he turns to Amy, blinking as if confused. "Miss what?"

"Your home," she says, dumping the groceries on the table. She sounds casual enough, but she fears that he can hear the worry in her voice. Outside the window, a car alarm wails; in one of the flats down the hall, a baby starts to holler.

He smiles. "Not at all," he says, "but then again, _yes_."

He gets up to help her put the food away. "Curry for supper?" she says, tripping over her purse. She curses and starts kicking it down the floor towards the door. It is an excuse to turn away - she's always been an open book and he can trace the meaning on the canvas of her face all too well.

"Please," he says, and then suddenly he catches her wrist on the way to the fridge. She smiles at him bemusedly; he turns her hand over and presses a kiss into her palm.

* * *

Even the most uncreative soul cannot be exposed to Vincent van Gogh for prolonged periods of time without having something of his genius rub off on them, and Amy is no exception. Though she's never considered herself any kind of artist – the obsessive series of paintings and puppets she created of herself with her Raggedy Doctor don't count, and anyway she left that off _years_ ago – she soon finds her fingers itching for pencil and paper and sneaks some from his studio one morning when he's gone out for milk.

What she does is mostly crap, and the more work she puts in on a drawing the worse it looks, though there is, she thinks objectively, _something_ to the rawest, roughest sketches she does, some life to the swoop of a pigeon's wing or the sharp bend of her own thumb or the craggy profile of Vincent's face, this last done hastily while he sleeps. She crumples up the worst of her efforts and hides the rest, tucking them in the backs of drawers and underneath her sweaters in the wardrobe.

She thinks he has gone out for the afternoon when she takes out one of her stolen sketchbooks and curls up in the chair near the window to draw. She tries his face from memory; she is still terrible with the texture of hair so he gets to wear his old battered straw hat instead, and his beard is no more than a clumsy attempt at crosshatching.

"The proportions are off," Vincent says from behind her when she pauses for a moment to chew on the end of her pencil.

She whips around, hair flying. He is kneeling behind her, arms crossed on the back of her chair.

"Yes, I know," she says confusedly, peeling a lock of her hair out of her mouth. "That is, I mean, haha, I'm not any _good_, of course…"

She knows her face is bright red and she only just resists the temptation to press the pad of paper to her chest so he can't see or to run out back to the car park and _burn it_ in a bin because he has already gently taken the pencil from her fingers and is leaning over her shoulder to show her what he means. He lightly draws a line down the centre of his face – that is, her sketch of his face – and maps out a grid of notches to show where his features should be aligned but aren't.

"It becomes second nature after awhile, the angles of it, but once you start to notice it you'll never be able to stop," he says. He lifts his hand from the page and considers it. "There. You see? They should follow that curve just there – "

She does. She tucks her hair behind her ear and says, "I do see, yeah," then takes the pencil back from him when he taps the back of her hand with it. She meets his gaze; he is smiling, blue eyes crinkled.

"It's good, Amy," Vincent says, coming round her chair, balancing on the arm of it. "It's really very good. And so are the rest of the ones you've been hiding."

Amy's cheeks go hot again but this time she hooks a finger in the collar of his shirt and tugs him down for a kiss. He tastes of paint; she wrinkles her nose, pulls back and touches away the line of bright yellow that lingers on the inside of his lip.

"What have I told you," she says, mock-solemnly, "about eating the paint, Vincent?"

"Funny girl," he says, and he bends to kiss her again. "I have an idea for your next piece," he adds, beard scraping at the soft skin of her neck when he lowers her lips to her throat.

"And what's that?" she says, ducking her head away when it starts to tickle.

He grins. "Nude Portrait of the Artist's Lover at Sunset," he says, raking his fingers through her hair softly, lingeringly, letting it flow like fire through his hands.

Amy arches an eyebrow. "Snappy _title_, brother," she says, and her fingers move to his belt buckle.

* * *

Amy rolls onto her side and a stick of charcoal crunches under her elbow.

Their bedroom is not truly a bedroom, and their bed is not truly a bed; space is at a premium in their tiny little flat so they sleep on a mattress on the floor of Vincent's studio. Most nights. When Vincent is working through the night, or when the paint fumes are particularly bad and it's too cold to crack a window, Amy usually kips on the couch in their kitchen, and while it's not the life she thought she'd have she would not trade it for the world – or even for any of the worlds the Doctor ever showed her.

Now, though, she sighs, flops back onto her stomach, licks her thumb and twists to try smearing the charcoal off the inside of her arm. She squints through the last rays of autumn sunlight filtering in through the grimy windows and sees that she has just made it worse.

Amy rests her chin on her arms and looks to the mirror leaning against the opposite wall – three months living here and they still haven't gotten around to putting it up. She watches Vincent's callused hand resting in the hollow curve of her pale back. Something of the way the lengthening shadows are playing over them both puts her in mind of an odalisque in the much-thumbed art history book she'd bought Vincent a few weeks ago. Only one volume of five, the book had been ruinously expensive despite being used and battered and it only went as far as 1993 but he'd looked as though he might weep when she gave it to him and she had resolved then and there to save up for the rest of the series and had run down to the shop after supper, pretending to have forgotten a load of clothes at the launderette, to ask the shopkeeper to put it aside for her.

Vincent's fingers brush down her spine and over to her hip, startling her from her reverie. She shifts her gaze to his reflected face; he is awake now and looking down at her, face inscrutable.

"Mm?" she says.

"Do you miss your home?"

Amy turns away from the mirror and back to him, lifting a hand to draw her fingers down his chest, tracing the network of scars from his gunshot and the subsequent surgery. She remembers the night she and the Doctor had found him, white and dying and alone; remembers his blood going from red to pink under the hammering rain; remembers cradling him in her arms on the way to hospital, hands shaking as she tried desperately to hold his insides in his body.

"Yes," she says. "And no."

Vincent kisses the crown of her head. Amy wonders if there is enough money in her account to pay for volume four; she closes her eyes and rests her cheek on his chest.


End file.
